throwaway32120

Very much this. Removing the monopoly universities have on the (fairly questionable) credentials used for employment would go along way toward solving many of these issues. Most of the discussion about the problem with universities seem to dance around the core problem.

That's one of the issues with hyperpartisanship. Everyone thinks that people need to be held accountable - as long as it's people they already decided were terrible. The truth is the response to this pandemic has been poor across the board. Go back and read what people were saying in February to see how unprepared everyone was.

Bill Gates, for example, is held up as someone who saw this coming. However, if you read what he wrote at the end of February about what needs to be done to stop the Coronavirus, you'll he didn't raise any issues about the way it was being handled within the United States, and viewed the main problem being the difficulties that poor countries would have handling it. Even a few days ago there were almost no leaders calling for mass use of face coverings. And there still seem to be very few (if any) calling for an implementation of measures like those that are successfully combating the virus in South Korea.

That's one of the most frustrating things about the response to this. Even now we don't have measures like having everyone wear face coverings, having temperature checks, limiting the number of people in establishments, etc., and it doesn't seem like anyone in power is advocating them at the moment. The response seems to be to first shut down the whole economy, then spend a few weeks thinking about what to do next.

I've seen no evidence that masks give people a false sense of security. If anything, it seems to be the opposite. People report that when they wear masks, people move away from them, and employers have asked them not to wear them because they might make the customers feel unsafe. They're a giant reminder that things aren't normal and that we're in the middle of a massive pandemic. This is a good thing.

If mask use becomes mandatory, will there still be groups of people standing in the middle of supermarket shouting to each other? Sure, just like there are now. The difference is those people will at least have masks on.

> In NYC at least, it was widely stated in the media by government officials and doctors that masks were unnecessary if you’re healthy, and actually could be bad

The WHO and CDC have been pushing that line as well. Studies linked to in the above article suggest that even home made masks provide some protection to healthy individuals. But even if they didn't, getting everyone to wear them would be extremely valuable for stopping the spread coming from people who don't know they have the disease. Also, "Don't come in hear unless you have something covering your face" is an easy rule for establishments to enforce, whereas "If you have Coronavirus you need to cover your face" is impossible to enforce.

Yet I've seen almost no leadership at any level in the U.S. pushing this (and this seems to be true in much of the West). Lockdowns buy us time, and we seem to be wasting that.

Yep. Just a week ago Cuomo was shut down the idea of shelter in place when de Blasio (who had been dragging his feet as well) was suggesting it[1]. This was a day after the Bay Area health officers announced a shelter in place order. He only relented when things really spun out of control.

The fact that people like Cuomo are now being praised for the way they handled this suggests that we aren't going to learn the lessons we need to.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/17/politics/bill-de-blasio-andre...

And like most things in America, the military costs much more than other countries and does much less for its citizens. A good example is what happened when Yemen fell apart: China used its military to evacuate Chinese citizens[1], India used its military to evacuate its citizens[2], and the US told its citizens that they were on their own[3]. The American embassy even told Americans trapped in Yemen that they should seek out the help of India in order to get out of the country[4]. It's hard to escape the notion that for decades America has suffered under a political class that's been a mix of incompetent, self-serving, and uncaring.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-32173811 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Raahat [3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/04/21/washington-to-americans... [4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/04/08...

Do you have evidence that other politicians would have handled things significantly differently? As I said, the articles I found from the beginning of the crisis don't demonstrate that. Have you found any articles from, say, the beginning of February where politicians are calling for a much more robust response? The legislative branch certainly has the ability to act when they don't think the executive branch is up to the task (they actually were embroiled with a political battle with Trump at the start of this, but it was about impeachment).

Getting rid of Trump and replacing him with someone who would have handled this much better is great. Replacing Trump with someone who would have handled things about as well, keeping all the other political leaders who dropped the ball on this, and not changing the deep structural issues that have made things worse, will do little to help.

One of the problems with the hyperpartisanship in America is that it prevents people from acknowledging leadership problems that both parties share. Though I think that Trump has done an incredibly poor job of handling this crisis, there's little evidence that other leaders - in Congress, at the state level, in the media, etc. - have done any better. Of course all our leaders will want to blame other people right now - failure is an orphan, as the saying goes.

I just did a search for news articles from the end of January to the end of February, and only found articles like this one[1], where politicians are criticizing the Trump administration's communication, but aren't callng for stronger efforts or mass mobilization (and the article has a quote from Pelosi saying she has confidence in how the CDC is handling things). Congress wasn't passing legislation to fight the pandemic as things were heating up, and governors don't seem to have made effective plans. The media didn't consider it to be a major disaster until recently (it didn't get brought up in the presidential debates until a couple weeks ago, IIRC). Issues like our lack of emergency stores for things like masks and our lack of an ability to manufacture them here is an issue that goes back for years, as is the poor safety net that leaves Americans so vulnerable in times like this.

Hopefully this crisis will encourage people to look at the poor leadership America has had across the board. Simply getting rid of Trump and calling it a day is just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2020/02/05/some-law...